American Airlines rolls out cloud computing service

Good Morning Silicon Valley
Posted by John Murrell on August 20th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Categorized as Uncategorized
http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2008/08/american-airlines-rolls-out-cloud-computing-service.html

Are you suffering from a sort of empty-nest syndrome now that you’ve moved all your data to the cloud? Now you can book a trip to visit it aboard American Airlines. The carrier is the first in the U.S. to offer full in-flight broadband (minus telephony), initially on the Boeing 767-200 aircraft making nonstop flights between New York and San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, and New York and Miami. The service, Gogo from Aircell, costs a flat $12.95 for flights over three hours ($9.95 for shorter trips, once the service expands), and speeds should be about what you get from earthbound mobile wireless. Cruchgear’s Peter Ha is blogging aboard the JFK to LAX flight, and reports things are working pretty well (except for the cabin attendant spilling water on his laptop).

Lined up behind this takeoff are competitive moves that will quickly transform in-flight broadband from novel to mundane. Delta plans to have the Gogo service available on selected flight by fall and across its domestic fleet by next summer. Virgin America is also going with Gogo, with a launch planned by year-end. JetBlue offers limited wireless access on one aircraft at the moment, Southwest and Alaska are in a testing phase, and United is still contemplating providers.

“Today the days of being cut off from the rest of the world while in the air become history,” said Jack Blumenstein, Aircell’s CEO, and therein lies the downside — the elimination of one of the few places left where you could legitimately say you were unavailable.

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